At Sgript Cymru |
| Sgript Cymru- Ghost City , New York , June 6, 2004 |
| Brits off-Broadway, everyone's favourite festival of Brits performing en masse at 59E59, makes a disconcerting addition with the U.S. premiere of "Ghost City," Gary Owen's postmodern accumulation of Welsh lives. With "sod you!" insouciance, the Sgript Cymru company injects some regional rage into the festival with it's kind of bitter wake for Wales. The piece consists of two dozen unrelated scenes, mostly monologues that take you on a tour of Cardiff's population — from the man selling rolls on a train to a squabbling couple changing a tyre in St. Mary's Street. There is no narrative riptide, nothing to carry us along from story to story. Instead, the sameness of each piece's rhythms feels more like the ebb and flow of the tide. There isn't any "play" here to get a handle on — Mr. Owen acquaints you with Wales the way Robert Altman introduced Nashville, Just as one man interests you, another takes his place. The only fear they all seem to share is that no one is listening, One, a radio-broadcaster shunted aside by young upstarts, knows his audi-ence is gone. A cabbie delivers his story to a fare — and who listens to their cabbie? In the clever hands of the four straight-shooting Welsh performers, any sentimentality is kept from cluttering the stage. The space is bleak enough — an elegant graveyard always underfoot. Soutra Gilmour's stool-height hollow boxes, some stacked three and four high, lie in a chessboard grid, each surrounded by a thick chalk line. The effect is of city blocks or buildings, freshly dead, outlined for the coroner. The snapshot-scenes play in random order, like songs off a CD. In each sequence, a moment of static interferes with the actors, immobilizing them with a sourceless pain. Director Simon Harris doesn't let these electric hums and sizzles derail the narrators; they return to their storytelling as though nothing has happened. The evening is similar — the wealth of personal narratives simply subside into a welter of information. But the electricity remains; clueing us into the same dangerous current — the third rail of living in Wales. |
Reviewed by: Helen Shaw (New York Sun) |
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